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This article treads lightly around calling bootcamp grads inferior on average, when actually, very little is standing between the company itself turning the boo

This article treads lightly around calling bootcamp grads inferior on average, when actually, very little is standing between the company itself turning the bootcamp grads into the engineers that they want. After all, you already have ample evidence someone can learn software development concepts on a compressed timeline compared to college, surely another week or so covering time/space complexity and data structures topics is worth the time if the candidate is otherwise a good fit. But I don't know, maybe their idea of junior development tasks is "find and fix deadlock or race condition that occurs 0.00001% of the time"

swimorsinka 9y ago
Author here: I don't believe anyone is inherently inferior. Given the same amount of time invested, I think everyone has a shot at performing well. But a computer science graduate typically has 4 years under his or her belt in an engineering heavy curriculum, and because of that time invested, they seem to be stronger in problem solving. We use Big-O as a signal for problem solving ability. Whether or not that signal is problematic is another question - you could argue that it is. So yes, I would say that someone who has invested 4 years into problem solving is going to have an advantage over someone who has only put in 6 months, even if those 6 months are dedicated. But the bootcamp graduate could equal the C.S. graduate with a little more investment.
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago
  But why don't you hire them, make that little investment yourself, and have them fix things they're capable of fixing while they catch up? This just seems like such a small obstacle that the technical parts would end up taking a back seat to other hiring criteria.
  - acr13 9y ago
    Seems like the answer is within your question. > why don't you hire them, make that little investment yourself, and have them fix things they're capable of fixing while they catch up? Because they can hire someone that has the skills they desire, and not have to worry about the investment time to get them up to speed.
    - FLUX-YOU 9y ago
      >Because they can hire someone that has the skills they desire, and not have to worry about the investment time to get them up to speed. Why are they taking interviews with bootcamp grads then? None of this is adding up to me: - The problem-solving gap between boot camp grads and CS grads in this company's opinion can reasonably be crossed via learning complexity analysis, and a couple of college courses in Algs/DS and Statistics - Despite having the candidate's resume and knowing their own opinions, the company still decides to take interviews from boot camp grads when, presumably, they have a pool of CS grad candidates to compare the boot camp grads to - The company wants boot camp grads to catch up while recognizing the gap is relatively small, despite having a pool of candidates they'd already prefer to hire from - They have time to interview boot camp grads and reject them but are otherwise unwilling to spend the same time directing a new boot camp hire towards things that would bridge the gap? There's plenty of cram-tutorials out there that a few weeks would catch someone up with
  - swimorsinka 9y ago
    Hiring someone who doesn't work out is unbelievably expensive. It can be a disaster for your team. When we hire someone, we have no way of knowing if they'll be the life-long learner type who will aggressively consume new knowledge and learn as much as they possibly can. In other words, we have no way of knowing if we can effectively train them, and it's crazy expensive if we can't. We've tried to hire 1 or 2 of them as interns, but usually they're not interested in being interns.
    - FLUX-YOU 9y ago
      But I don't think that trait would be discoverable in CS grads more often than boot camp grads. If it is, and you get a reliable source of candidates from CS grads, why not just filter on that and not bother with the time spent interviewing boot camp grads? And I'm not sure a couple of courses would change that in a person. That's distinctly out of the technical set of qualities.
    - matty22 9y ago
      Sounds like you guys should be hiring self-learners. If someone has taken multiples years of teaching themselves from scratch with no CS degree and no bootcamp attendence, they sound like the lifelong learner you guys are looking for. How often do you guys hire someone who is _neither_ a CS graduate nor a bootcamp graduate?
philwelch 9y ago
"Junior developers" in hot markets make six figure salaries. If you could get away with paying $50k-70k to a software engineering trainee and then promoting them after they work out, maybe it would make sense to do that. But if you're going to invest software engineering salaries in a field that doesn't even have the kinds of formal credentialing of similarly-paying fields like medicine, you're not going to risk hiring someone who's a work in progress and might not even work out in terms of having the basic qualifications.
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago
  >you're not going to risk hiring someone who's a work in progress and might not even work out in terms of having the basic qualifications. That's what the bloody technical tests are for! If you're giving those out, on top of a technical verbal interview, and still saying "well, we still don't know if they can even build a CRUD app with our stack", you have a broken hiring process! I can understand the difficulty in choosing the right questions for the limited time we all have to interview to extract the maximum useful amount of data about someone. And that there's a lot of debate about which questions are right ones to ask. But a technical test that represents the basic unit of usefulness to your company is bare bones stuff.
  - philwelch 9y ago
    Yeah, I thought we were talking about hiring people who had gaps in their basic CS knowledge and then training them.
    - FLUX-YOU 9y ago
      As long as they were otherwise able to contribute to the team, which is what should have been found out in the interview. That's what the boot camps are selling. The gaps in CS knowledge were what the article is saying was one of, if not the, deciding factor in choosing a CS grad over a boot camp grad.
      - philwelch 9y ago

swimorsinka 9y ago

Author here: I don't believe anyone is inherently inferior. Given the same amount of time invested, I think everyone has a shot at performing well. But a computer science graduate typically has 4 years under his or her belt in an engineering heavy curriculum, and because of that time invested, they seem to be stronger in problem solving. We use Big-O as a signal for problem solving ability. Whether or not that signal is problematic is another question - you could argue that it is. So yes, I would say that someone who has invested 4 years into problem solving is going to have an advantage over someone who has only put in 6 months, even if those 6 months are dedicated. But the bootcamp graduate could equal the C.S. graduate with a little more investment.

FLUX-YOU 9y ago
But why don't you hire them, make that little investment yourself, and have them fix things they're capable of fixing while they catch up? This just seems like such a small obstacle that the technical parts would end up taking a back seat to other hiring criteria.
- acr13 9y ago
  Seems like the answer is within your question. > why don't you hire them, make that little investment yourself, and have them fix things they're capable of fixing while they catch up? Because they can hire someone that has the skills they desire, and not have to worry about the investment time to get them up to speed.
  - FLUX-YOU 9y ago
    >Because they can hire someone that has the skills they desire, and not have to worry about the investment time to get them up to speed. Why are they taking interviews with bootcamp grads then? None of this is adding up to me: - The problem-solving gap between boot camp grads and CS grads in this company's opinion can reasonably be crossed via learning complexity analysis, and a couple of college courses in Algs/DS and Statistics - Despite having the candidate's resume and knowing their own opinions, the company still decides to take interviews from boot camp grads when, presumably, they have a pool of CS grad candidates to compare the boot camp grads to - The company wants boot camp grads to catch up while recognizing the gap is relatively small, despite having a pool of candidates they'd already prefer to hire from - They have time to interview boot camp grads and reject them but are otherwise unwilling to spend the same time directing a new boot camp hire towards things that would bridge the gap? There's plenty of cram-tutorials out there that a few weeks would catch someone up with
- swimorsinka 9y ago
  Hiring someone who doesn't work out is unbelievably expensive. It can be a disaster for your team. When we hire someone, we have no way of knowing if they'll be the life-long learner type who will aggressively consume new knowledge and learn as much as they possibly can. In other words, we have no way of knowing if we can effectively train them, and it's crazy expensive if we can't. We've tried to hire 1 or 2 of them as interns, but usually they're not interested in being interns.
  - FLUX-YOU 9y ago
    But I don't think that trait would be discoverable in CS grads more often than boot camp grads. If it is, and you get a reliable source of candidates from CS grads, why not just filter on that and not bother with the time spent interviewing boot camp grads? And I'm not sure a couple of courses would change that in a person. That's distinctly out of the technical set of qualities.
  - matty22 9y ago
    Sounds like you guys should be hiring self-learners. If someone has taken multiples years of teaching themselves from scratch with no CS degree and no bootcamp attendence, they sound like the lifelong learner you guys are looking for. How often do you guys hire someone who is _neither_ a CS graduate nor a bootcamp graduate?

philwelch 9y ago

"Junior developers" in hot markets make six figure salaries. If you could get away with paying $50k-70k to a software engineering trainee and then promoting them after they work out, maybe it would make sense to do that. But if you're going to invest software engineering salaries in a field that doesn't even have the kinds of formal credentialing of similarly-paying fields like medicine, you're not going to risk hiring someone who's a work in progress and might not even work out in terms of having the basic qualifications.

FLUX-YOU 9y ago
>you're not going to risk hiring someone who's a work in progress and might not even work out in terms of having the basic qualifications. That's what the bloody technical tests are for! If you're giving those out, on top of a technical verbal interview, and still saying "well, we still don't know if they can even build a CRUD app with our stack", you have a broken hiring process! I can understand the difficulty in choosing the right questions for the limited time we all have to interview to extract the maximum useful amount of data about someone. And that there's a lot of debate about which questions are right ones to ask. But a technical test that represents the basic unit of usefulness to your company is bare bones stuff.
- philwelch 9y ago
  Yeah, I thought we were talking about hiring people who had gaps in their basic CS knowledge and then training them.
  - FLUX-YOU 9y ago
    As long as they were otherwise able to contribute to the team, which is what should have been found out in the interview. That's what the boot camps are selling. The gaps in CS knowledge were what the article is saying was one of, if not the, deciding factor in choosing a CS grad over a boot camp grad.
    - philwelch 9y ago